Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [see update]
Well, the claims of the “first climate refugees” are coming up again. I think we’re up to the ninth first climate refugees, it’s hard to keep track. In any case, I came across this:
International leaders gathering in Paris to address global warming face increasing pressure to tackle the issue of “climate refugees.” Some island nations are already looking to move their people to higher ground, even purchasing land elsewhere in preparation.
In the U.S. Northwest, sea-level rise is forcing a Native American tribe to consider abandoning lands it has inhabited for thousands of years.
The Quinault Indian Nation, whose small village lies at the mouth of the Quinault River on the outer coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, now relies on a 2,000-foot-long sea wall to protect it from the encroaching Pacific Ocean.
Small, ramshackle homes back up to the modest wall of rock and gravel. Last March, Quinault Tribal Council President Fawn Sharp got a call in the middle of the night from an elder who lives in one of those homes.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repaired the sea wall, but it’s a temporary fix. A more permanent solution is on the table — but it won’t be cheap or easy.
The Quinault tribe has developed a $60 million plan to move the entire village of Taholah uphill and out of harm’s way. That will mean relocating the school, the courthouse, the police station and the homes of 700 tribal members a safer distance from the encroaching Pacific.
“It’s a heavy price tag,” Sharp acknowledged, adding that she and others with the Quinault will be turning to Congress, philanthropists and the tribe’s own financial resources to pay for the project.
So … just where are the Quinault, and what are they facing? The Quinault Reservation is on the Pacific side of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. NOAA has a “Climate Explorer” that lets us see just how great the danger might be from a one-foot (30-com) sea level rise. Here’s a blink comparator of the two for their main town, Taholah …
Hmmm … as you can see, even a one foot rise will do little to the town, doesn’t even make it in as far as the street nearest to the river.
In any case, how long will it take for the ocean to rise that one foot? To answer that, we can take a look at the nearest tide gauge, which is at Neah Bay on the tip of the Olympic Peninsula. Here is that record …
Ooops … according to the data, the sea level has been falling since the start of the tidal records … go figure. Since 1940 the sea level off of northern Washington has dropped about 15 cm. (6 inches). At that rate, how long will it take to rise one foot?
Could be a day or two …
So given that their claims of sea level rise are contradicted by the actual observations, why do the Quinault want to move? Well, more than anything it has to do with the upcoming terrifying tsunami that will strike the northwest coast. Is this an empty threat or a disaster movie scenario? By no means. Geological records indicate that the Juan De Fuca earthquake fault right off the coast has ruptured regularly throughout geological history, and is currently overdue for another major quake.
And each of the big historical quakes has been accompanied by a huge tsunami that smashed into the coast. So the question is not whether a giant tsunami will hit Taholah, but when it will hit.
Bottom line? According to the Quinault Relocation plan the concerns are “the ever-present threat of tsunamis and the growing risk from climate change impacts.” Sadly, the claim about climate is totally bogus. The same document says:
Ocean acidification, hypoxia events, sea level rise, coastal erosion, tidal surge, and increasing severity and intensity of storm events are now occurring with disturbing frequency.
Oh, please. Sea level is NOT rising, that’s a total misrepresentation. Nor have storm events increased in intensity or severity.
Look, I have compassion for the Quinault. In addition to all the other problems faced by reservations all over the US, they are staring an upcoming tsunami in the face. In their shoes I’d want to move, and I’d be making all kinds of noise about every possible threat to try to squeeze money out of the various donors and government agencies.
But other than the tsunami, the claims of danger are all smoke and mirrors. I wish them every success in getting the money … I just don’t like the misrepresentations in the process.
Best to everyone,
w.
My Request: Misunderstandings can be reduced. If you disagree with someone, please have the courtesy to QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOUR OBJECT TO, so we can understand the exact nature of your disagreement.
[UPDATE]: In the comments someone asked about why the traditional people would live in a tsunami zone.
My GUESS, and it is only that, is that the Quinault historically didn’t “live” anywhere more specific than their traditional homeland. Within that, my guess is that they had structures in several locations where they resided when they were harvesting the various foods available in different parts of that homeland. One of the locations would be the main area where they spent more of the time. If I owned their turf, I’d live at the ocean, for a simple reason—that’s where the most food is.
As the commenter pointed out, traditional people have a long history in the area. In addition, traditional people usually a long memory as well. My GUESS, and it is only that, is that their traditional main village location is somewhere near the place marked “Assemble Here” with the white arrows on the Taholah Tsunami Evacuation Map, viz:
Per Google Earth, that location is on the order of a hundred feet (30 m) above sea level, and it is also outside the model simulated tsunami range shown in red. Those old guys knew more than we might imagine.
And indeed, that same area is near the proposed location of the relocated town, up on the highland. It’s the area at the lower right below, where you can see the real reason for the proposed relocation, and how little it has to do with climate change.
Ooog … they have to move the school and the senior center and the police and the tribal court and the wastewater treatment plant … a huge undertaking. Their relocation plan is here (with an awesome banner at the top), and I wish them the very best in their project.
Previous First Climate Refugees
The Sixth First Climate Refugees 2013-07-02
For years now, folks have searched desperately for the “fingerprints” of human climate change. These are things that are supposed to reveal how and where humans are affecting the climate. One of these fingerprints, which is alleged to be a sure and certain harbinger of the thermal end times, is…
Breaking News! Seventh First Climate Refugees Discovered! 2013-08-09
Well, my heart fell when I saw the recent BBC article which proudly proclaimed that the people of Kivalina were slated to become “America’s first climate change refugees” … Figure 1. The Alaskan native village of Kivalina. SOURCE: BBC My heart fell for three reasons. First, because once again we…
The Eighth First Climate Refugees 2015-12-26
I’ve written before about the crazy claims of “climate refugees”, there’s a list of posts in the notes below. When I set out to write about bogus climate claims, I find myself in what I call a “target-rich environment”. Crazy ideas on the subject…
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Here is something new that is SO cool. Animated Google Earth images. Showing the last 22 years of development/changes in a particular location on Google Earth.
It will open over Miami and show you the amazing growth of Miami since 1984, but if you type in “Tahola Washington” into the search bar, it will rapidly move over and then focus down on this town and give you an amazing animation of how this community/area has changed over the last 22 years.
Naturally, hard to see any sea level rise. But, it looks like they have been doing all kinds of clear-cut logging all over the reservation. Like a LOT. So concerned about the environment etc.
Definitely Bookmark this page. It is awesome. And we are going to use it over and over again for glacial retreats and moving calving glaciers etc. All the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers etc. show up pretty well (some not though).
https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/
Too bad there isn’t imagery for the whole earth (Whole Earth?).
Thanks!
Are you missing any particular place?
There is also a good record of things greening. looking at my acreage year by year in the “pause” mode it appears there are some repeated pictures, as if not everything got photographed every year. Still this is much better than the “time travel” mode of Google Earth.
Bill, you are getting old! It is 32 years! Great find however! Thanks!
If the people of Taholah are worried about tsunamis, then perhaps so should every coastal city from Neah Bay to Eureka, California. The entire coast between these points was hit by a large tsunami in January 1700 and studies by Brian Atwater have shown that the recurrence interval of such events is about 300 years. They are set off by earthquakes accompanied by a couple of meters of sudden dropping of the land when the N. American plate moves over the Pacific plate. The geologic record of such tsunamis is preserved in drowned forests buried in mud at various places along the coastline. Some of the best places to see the buried forests include tidal channels near Willapa Bay and several places in Oregon and northern California. I’ve been to the ones near Willalpa Bay with Brian and the exposures of tsunami deposits along the tidal channels are remarkable. The earthquakes and tsunamis were most likely very similar to the 1964 Alaska quake and the 1961 Chilean quake which were both magnitude ~9 on the Richter scale.
When Brian was studying the tsunami deposits near Willapa Bay, he dated buried trees from several tsunami deposits, including the last one at 300 years. He then went to Japan where he looked up historic tsunamis and found one that was historically recorded in Jan 1700 AD but didn’t appear to be associated with any seismic activity in Japan. Apparently, it came all the way across the Pacific from North America and that appears to be the date of the 300-year old tsunami at Willapa Bay.
The 300-year recurrence interval of coastal tsunamis means that we are due for an near 9 magnitude earthquake along the coast with an accompanying tsunami anytime now. If you live along the west coast, pick out your high ground now!
DE, Nice restatement of the basic tectonic facts. Only question is partial or complete rupture of the fault. Based on land vertical distortion, full is again likely as there have been no intervening partial reliefs.
The 300 year interval is based upon some questionable correlations of turbidite sequences. The plate-wide events with good confidence in correlation between cores is more like 1500 years. Don’t ever let actual data get in the way of alarmism.
Not just turbidites. Tsunami overwash sands contain datable carbon, and crosscutting relationships of sand and mud volcanoes further support THOSE records. 300 years comes out shining on that account. And if that is the case, A big one is due. Don’t let careful geological study get in the way of some good rhetoric.
The one big onshore record was 300 years ago no doubt. The multiple events are seen in the offshore turbidites. The onshore record you refer to is far too incomplete to come up with an average time interval.
Doug,
No it isn’t–it is solidly based on stratigraphy and 14C dating. A typical sequence (from bottom up) is drowned treed buried by marine tsunami sand carried inland by a wave, then estuarine mud as the downdropped land silts up with tidal deposits. You can verify this for yourself–it’s still there.
Yes the last big event is as you describe. The multiple events required to establish a typical interval are not. An associate in the thick of the research admitted as much after the New Yorker article. No good evidence for plate wide rupture in a 300 year repeated interval. Good evidence for 1200-1500 years
Had a weekend place in Ocean Park on the Long Beach Peninsula for about 10 years. We had neighbors who had an old Navy lifeboat made of concrete, had reserved seating just in case. The other option was to grab a good bottle of scotch and a cigar, climb up on the roof and watch it coming. There was no way you were getting off the Peninsula.
…. Let’s attempt a “Tried and True” method of fixing this horrible problem…….maybe…Move ? …Just because you CHOOSE to live in a dangerous area, does not mean other people should pay for your choice of area ( like rich houses on the beach), no matter how much you like it….. Of course, this only applies IF it was their choice..Many Indigenous people in North America lost their land in times war, but that is a different topic and does not apply here…
Nothing like a relaxing hanging-wall bulge to create room for even further tsunami inundation, as is proven by successive tsunami overwash deposits cored all along that coastline. Climate that.
My guess is that anything that NOAA has such as a tide gauge is not acceptable. Why? It is “White Man Science”.
Quinault know Earth, Water and Sky. Quinault Intelligent!
White Man dumb”! White Man thieve! White Man murder!
Quinault will take White Man money! Then Kill White Man!
It is good for Quinault. Great Spirit will be happy again.
“In the U.S. Northwest, sea-level rise is forcing a Native American tribe to consider abandoning lands it has inhabited for thousands of years.”
They should be used to this. After all, their ancestors had to adjust several times to the flooding of the land bridge they came over on.
Just bought property at Ocean Shores where we plan to spend the part of the year when mosquitoes carry away where we are now in Louisiana.
My wife was worried about our chances of evacuating in tsunami. I said zero. If safe evacuation is a criterion, visiting family in Louisiana is out because of tornadoes.
It is always something. I would prefer the kids tell a story of mom and dad being swept away in a tsunami than wasting away in a cancer ward.
We enjoy the nomadic life. If you do not like where you are at, move.
For $60 million they could build a helluva an ocean front casino and loot those Microsoft pale faces for many moons.
Once the big one hits they’ll already have a condo in HI.
https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/olym/schalk/chap5.htm
I realize climate alarmists are unlikely to spend much time following the science because it rarely supports their agenda, but this is interesting reading on the paleoenvironment of the Pacific Northwet Coast. And no, I didn’t misspell that. This is the wettest place in Washington. It is also where a lot of silt went that was picked up when glacial lake Missoula carved out the scablands of eastern Washington. That kind of silting has not occurred since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods
the next 9.0 mag Cascadia earthquake will drop the Olympia Peninsula by around 10 feet in a out 3-4 minutes of rolling ground waves… then 15 min later a 40 foot high tidal surge will destroy whats left.
Climate change claims are merely a hook to try to get more money to move to safer ground.
To see all of the evidence for recurrence see these references
You can download the paper “The orphan tsunami of 1700—Japanese clues to a parent earthquake in North America” at
https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/pp1707
Atwater, B.F., and Hemphill-Haley, E., 1997, Recurrence intervals for great earthquakes of the past 3,500 years at northeastern Willapa Bay, Washington: U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1576, 108 p. {18, 21, 24}
Atwater, B.F., and Yamaguchi, D.K., 1991, Sudden, probably coseismic submergence of Holocene trees and grass in coastal Washington State: Geology, v. 19, p. 706-709. {17}
Atwater, B.F., Stuiver, M., and Yamaguchi, D.K., 1991, Radiocarbon test of earthquake magnitude at the Cascadia subduction zone: Nature, v. 353, p. 156-158. {25}
Atwater, B.F., Yelin, T.S., Weaver, C.S., and Hendley, J.W., III, 1995, Averting surprises in the Pacific Northwest: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 111-95, 2 p. [http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/ prepare/factsheets/PacNW/]. {104}
Atwater, B.F., Cisternas V., M., Bourgeois, J., Dudley, W.C., Hendley, J.W. II, and Stauffer, P.H., 1999, Surviving a tsunami—lessons from Chile, Hawaii, and Japan: U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1187, 18 p. [pubs.usgs.gov/circ/ c1187/; in Spanish, as U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1218, http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1218/%5D. {5, 11, 49, 80}
Atwater, B.F., Baker, D., Barnhardt, W.A., Burrell, K.S., Haraguchi, T., Higman, B., Kayen, R.E., Minasian, D., Nakata, T., Satake, K., Shimokawa, K., Takada, K., and Cisternas V., M., 2001a, Grouted sediment slices show signs of earthquake shaking: Eos, v. 82, p. 603, 608. {23}
Atwater, B.F., Yamaguchi, D.K., Bondevik, S., Barnhardt, W.A., Amidon, L.J., Benson, B.E., Skjerdal, G., Shulene, J.A., and Nanayama, F., 2001b, Rapid resetting of an estuarine recorder of the 1964 Alaska earthquake: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 113, p. 1193-1204. {14}
Atwater, B.F., Tuttle, M.P., Schweig, E.S., Rubin, C.M., Yamaguchi, D.K., and Hemphill-Haley, E., 2004, Earthquake recurrence inferred from paleoseismology, in Gillespie, A.R., Porter, S.C., and Atwater, B.F., editors, The Quaternary Period in the United States: Amsterdam, Elsevier, p. 331-350. {16, 100, 101}
Yup 1.6 mm/yr uplift. About right for for its setting – classic upthrust given its relationship to a major tectonic boundary. Its had 28 earthquakes, mag 1 and above, since 1931. I bet the soils are comprised of modern marine sediments. Go buy real estate their now! 🙂
“Go buy real estate their now! ”
I would imagine it’ll be considerably cheaper after the quake. And you’ll also be able to see if it is under water.
do see this report from senior military figures from several nations (not likely to be leftists or government influenced, I would suspect).
http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1417022-video-generals-sound-alarm-over-climate-change-at-halifax-international-security-
“Top-ranking military officers are warning that climate change could severely impact global security as sea levels rise and prolonged droughts grip poorer nations.
Speaking at the Halifax International Security Forum on Saturday, Dutch General Tom Middendorp warned that climate change is fuelling war worldwide.”
also reported here
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/01/climate-change-trigger-unimaginable-refugee-crisis-senior-military
Says it all. The Syrian civil war is obviously not “sparked by drought”, but by US supported terrorists. The only remaining question is why Gen. Middendorp can’t tell tell the truth?
Ah yes, everything bad is caused by the US.
It’s impossible for you to believe that Asad is a brutal dictator and that there are people in his country who would like to see him gone.
No, it’s all because the US.
Winston Churchill on the brilliance of military commanders – “the possibility of Singapore having no landward defences no more entered into my mind than that of a battleship being launched without a bottom.”
Seriously Griff. Why would you think military leaders are any less ill-informed about climate change than you are?
And in the case of the navies, they have to pay some attention as most of the hundreds of billions of US dollars/Euros/Yuan/etc they have invested in facilities is, of necessity, located very close to sea level and everyone agrees that sea levels are rising a bit. If you are going to build a new wharf or shipyard or whatever that may be in use for centuries, the question of whether it will remain above water should possibly be of some concern.
Why don’t you save that for posting under a more appropriate thread, where it is the topic of discussion? You always seem to want to derail the thread.
Top ranking military figures are not politically influenced?
Griff, just what drugs are you taking and are they legal in your country?
Quick!
Move to one of those countries, before they get wise.
This one must be the sea wall, I guess.
It fits with all the other up-is-down logic we’ve put up with in recent years and administrations.
It’s time for a whathaveyou fill-in-the-blank grant.
From the fascinating New Yorker article, TheReally Big One
w.
As noted above separately, plus many for this additional comment. ‘Evidence’ comes in many forms. Some not traditionally ‘scientific’, yet still valid. This comment reminds of the medical search for herbal remedies among ‘shamen’, which amongst others has led to the newish discovery of artemisinin against malaria. The willow bark extract acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) being the first such.
I see that there was a sequel to the New Yorker article, entitled “How To Stay Safe When The Big One Comes“. More good stuff.
w.
.
The word “precaution” is mentioned zero times in this article. Precaution only applies to climate.
We spent a weekend at Westport a few months back. rented a condo online, When we got there the beach erosion was about 20′ from the back door. It had chewed up roughly 80′ of the dunes in less than a year. COE had refused any type of seawall to save the development. The funniest part was walking along and finding old tree trunks buried 10′ to 15′ below the sand dunes, exposed by the recent erosion..No one wants to talk about how they got there in the first place.
Back in the 80s, when I was a Graduate Slave, I was doing some field work on Jupiter Island in Florida and found a drowned forest there. It was slowly being exposed by erosion caused by the stabilization of the inlet to the north. This was in the state park section of the island, zero development there, but to the south and the stabilized Jupiter Inlet it is nothing but condos and palatial homes. Also the famous Blowing Rocks that the Nature Conservancy now owns. At least they are close enough to the Jupiter Inlet jetty that they should not be affected too much by erosion
PMK
As an occasional visitor to Tahola I can’t help but wonder if the motivation for this scam is to find someone else to pay for their failing local infrastructure (the whole town is a dump) or to pay for relocation. Driving through the third world wasteland that is Tahola never ceases to depress me.
About 43 miles south of Taholah is a place called Washaway Beach.
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/sea/coast/erosion/washaway.html
There is much information on this area. One of the ideas is that many years ago a source of sediment became depleted or in some other way lost. The changes can be documented but not back to a first cause.
This is a very active coast. That’s not news.
The big worry for the area is a full or major rupture along the Cascadia Subduction zone. Deaths and refugees will be plenty. Last time was January, 1700.
Now that I’ve looked at more of the comments I note others have covered the big quake.
I’ll just add that Brian Atwater has an excellent presentation. And he’s a nice person.
If you have the chance, go hear him.